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How to lose $950 quickly on Airbnb
How I lost $950 in about an hour on AirBnB by stupidly thinking it worked like a hotel
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,824 posts.
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Writing summaries is more important than reading more books
One thing I’ve learned over time is to read fewer books but to take the time to write summaries for the good ones. The ROI of spending 2h writing a synopsis is much higher than spending those 2h powering through the next book on your list. Reading is not about page count or speed. What matters is ho
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"No, it's less effort than that"
Ever heard ‘No, it’s less effort than that!’? Learn why challenging Agile estimates can lead to bad planning and how to handle estimate pushback effectively.
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Making Python faster with Rust
Update: I gave a talk on this topic at P99 CONF 2023 and at PyCon IL 2024 (Hebrew). A while ago at $work, we had a performance issue with one of our core Python …
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OpenAI is too cheap to beat
Data matters; infrastructure matters more
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Banking in uncertain times
We may be in the early stages of a banking crisis: why, what we're doing to avoid it, and what we may not get about it.
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In search of the least viewed article on Wikipedia (2022)
Wikipedia sure is popular. The most popular articles in a given week routinely get millions of views. But with 6 million plus articles, Wikipedia has plenty ...
549
Things Every Hacker Once Knew (2017)
One fine day in January 2017 I was reminded of something I had half-noticed a few times over the previous decade. That is, younger hackers don’t know the bit structure of ASCII and the meaning of the odder control characters in it.
550
Beautiful branchless binary search
I read a blog post by Alex Muscar, “Beautiful Binary Search in D”. It describes a binary search called “Shar’s algorithm”. I’d never heard of it and it’s i…
551
The Staff Engineer's Path – Book Review
The Staff Engineer’s Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change is written by Tanya Reilly and published on October 25, 2022, by O’Reilly Media. Favorite Quotes Early in your career, if you do a great job on something that turns out to be unnecessary, you’ve still done a great job. At the…
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Extreme questions to trigger new, better ideas
We know, "no idea is a bad idea," but brainstorming is often unsuccessful. These prompts actually work. They could even lead to a unique business model.
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I changed my mind about nuclear waste
I’ve feared it. I’ve protested it. Now I’m hugging it
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Layoffs push down scores on Glassdoor – how companies respond
Several tech companies face a fresh problem after cutting jobs: their rating on Glassdoor nosedives. But there’s a way they manage to fix this. I show what companies are doing - and why.
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How the Xbox 360 knows if your hard drive is genuine
Reverse engineering the kernel-mode authenticity check, and how Microsoft knows about your hacked/custom hard-drive.
556
Uncensored Models
I am publishing this because many people are asking me how I did it, so I will explain. When I talk about a model, I'm talking about a huggingface…
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Using extra Firefox profiles to make my life better
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
558
Don't use custom CSS scrollbars
While a custom CSS scrollbar may seem flashy and fun, consider that it may present a significant, unnecessary barrier to access.
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I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know (2016)
(Spoiler: trusting your contributors works) Some years ago, I polished up and released an abandoned project for storing financial data in Django. It let you declare “Money” fields on your models, dealing with proper storage and currencies for you. My use case for the library, django-money eventually faded, but it…
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Bad numbers in the “gzip beats BERT” paper?
The recent paper, “Low-Resource” Text Classification: A Parameter-Free Classification Method with Compressors by Jiang et al. [ link ] recently received a lot of attention on twitter.
563
The infrastructure behind ATMs
ATMs are connected to banks by networks which operate little-understood payment rails.
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When did people stop being drunk all the time?
Trends in alcohol consumption from the middle ages to the modern world tell a story.
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Mozilla 2023 annual report: CEO pay skyrockets, Firefox market share nosedives
Connect with Lunduke and other members of Lunduke community
566
Don't fire your illustrator
Understanding (and Art Directing) AI image generators
567
Rust concepts I wish I learned earlier
This past month, I have been enthralled by the Rust programming language given its unique edge for writing memory-safe, modern programs. Over the years, several languages have emerged as the most preferred by engineers to write resilient, backend software. The tides have shifted from Java/C++ into Go and Rust, which…
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ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time
Or 10 tweets about ChatGPT
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Emacs 29.1
Today is a great day for Emacs - Emacs 29.1 has just been released1! Every Emacs release is special, but I haven’t been so excited about a new version of Emacs in ages. Why so? Reason #1 - pure GTK front-end (a.k.a. pgtk). This also means that now Emacs supports natively Wayland. Which in tern means that it’s easier…
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Bullshit graph database performance benchmarks
Hey HackerNews, let me just drop my mixtape, checkout my soundcloud and “Death Row” is the label that pays me. How is the Graph Database category supposed to grow when vendors keep spou…